Читать книгу Jay to Bee - Janet Frame - Страница 9
ОглавлениеJANUARY/YADDO
The arrival of Janet’s muse, part man, part woman, part bird, part cat, made in a collage drawing game.
“Thank you for the inspired drawing of my muse . . .” [Letter 19]aa
Illustration based on a parlour game that involved several participants drawing on a folded sheet of paper.
13. Elnora’s Place January 1970 (handwritten)
Dear Bill,
Your curious (black & white) drawing arrived today and shall be appropriately framed whereupon you & Paul & collaborators go down in history. Your letter was a delight, also the communication from the Alters Art Gallery, also the extraordinary evidence that Ned is beginning to express himself in English & that his number work (as his calendar sensitivity) is commendable. The rewards of your training him must be uplifting to your body and soul.
Meanwhile I write from New York in a bit of a daze and haze from Elnora’s womb-like apartment where she lies most hours enveloped in sleep, in human hibernation—I guess the only way to resist the world & its pressures. We’ve had fun, in her waking hours; her New Year meal was delicious & it was when I was sodden with black-eyed peas, corn bread & salt pork hocks, collard greens, that I whispered my timid hello into the N.Y.—L.A. telephone line. O to be in . . . . etc.
My publisher has given me a copy of one of his magnificent books, for Christmas: Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry & as Braziller was the only one in his office I was able to help myself to some of my books which he fetched from the store room: 2 Pocket Mirrors. I gave one to Elnora. Would you like one? And another I’ll give to Jo. Next week I get the galleys of my ‘shocking, wildly comic, lyrical, tragic,’ etc. etc. etc. book & if I can I will treat the editor who wrote the blurb with my new kind of Death Ray—I’m awfully sorry but the bottom has fallen out of the Peedauntal Business and I can’t for the life of me understand why, or what happened, or whether it was my business acumen that failed or simply the cheap material used in the manufacture of the peedauntals.
I’ve gone into the Death & Thought-Ray business, quite modestly, and I still offer the deluxe limited line of Peedauntals. My Death Ray will be useful for editors who write blurbs and, later, for critics. It may help at Yaddo also. I know it’s not a very original product but my advisers recommend (through a spokesman of course) that I be conservative in my business interests. Thought-Rays, Feeling Rays, Death-Rays have (apparently) a steady market. So far, I’m the only one I know who uses them—at least my model which has many extras & a hi-fi tuning device & people-selector. It can fit, of course, like any small object or animal—say, raccoons & suchlike—into any pocket or recess & that’s the beauty of it, the users say.
Enough of news of the dull work-a-day world. Here is a curious (handwritten) verse.
He wore gold braid. His blood shone
like urine in the sun. He was afraid
of water, fire and heart transplant,
of mountains higher than seven thousand feet.
Yet unbuttoning his handmade overcoat,
he rode furiously down Thrillstreet.
New York has a special chill in its air, & skies today were high, clear and blue & I rode the bus downtown and back & that’s the local colour and now I’ll sleep for it is past midnight.
Elnora gave me her autobiographical manuscript to read. It’s very moving in its detailed record of the indifference & insensitivity shown by otherwise ‘nice’ people, & its account of her father’s struggle to die.
These stars represent my broken thought-processes. Elnora’s family is arriving from Philadelphia today & her daughter will be home too & peaceful (?) Yaddo beckons.
I’m posting Jo’s rock (glittering) to her today. As Elnora may have told you she loved the ring.
a typographical fixation
Love to Paul
Love to Ned the sly one
These are also suns and pine-needles and mutilated spokesmen, cords of wood & thistledown-heads & tumbleweed going nowhere. I had in mind to write you a slick New York verse (‘I sit in one of the dives of 52nd St.’ W.H.A.) and may, from Yaddo where I will read the Mallarmé poem also.
14. New York January 4 (postcard)
This is a reminder from Elnora and me.
Written in haste. More from Saratoga Springs, in detail.
Nice phone call but phones scare me.
15. Yaddo January 6
Hello Bill,
First, the monotonous theme without variations—I miss you, miss you.
Next, I’ve just disposed of my lunch, at eight forty-five a.m., and look forward to a long day’s work with perceptions sharpened by increasing hunger, or that is how it should happen, except that some time during the day I’ll probably fall asleep on the cane chaise longue, blanketed and sheeted and pillowed, in the corner of this vast light studio. Oh, I am so privileged—I have a wall thermostat to adjust room heat; I have five tables and one small long low table, chairs, book cases, an adjustable easel of the kind that Hyde Solomon told me he introduced to Yaddo (he has been a kind of adviser for many years on art, artists and equipment) and another easel like the one you had in your studio at MacDowell where you could pin sheets of paper to work on; numerous lights from all angles; a washbasin and john/can or whatever you call it, with, so far, no mice working lace patterns on the toilet paper.
You could be here painting.
Over in West House I have a nice bedroom and bathroom with my window looking out on the woods a few feet away and the deep deep snow—I walk through snowbanks five feet high to get to my studio fifteen yards from the house. The snow squeaks like icing sugar when you walk on it, and it is full of sparkles.
There are six guests here, none of whom I’ve met before: a raving old man who arrived yesterday and spoke in a loud voice throughout dinner (served at one table where the Secretary and the Director and his wife also dine); a smooth dark plump man who described his son’s third birthday and decided the human race will not become extinct (a Basil the Gloom topic hung around the dinner-table), a woman, maybe in her forties, personable, intelligent, dull; another woman, a Sylvia, rather like an alternative version of Sylvie—as if there’d been many cast and put out at stations and colonies through the world—she seems more thoughtful and less jovial than the other guest; and a young painter (black) whose first one-man show has just opened in New York. And J.F. Oh for the babies of MacDowell!
Meanwhile, back in New York . . . I enjoyed being at Elnora’s place though her constant hibernation is rather alarming and she seems to have got herself a massive escape through sleep and tranquillisers and sleeping pills. I’m quite a keen sleeper myself so I enjoyed the rest, especially after my rather nasty Baltimore life, but I couldn’t help worrying about Elnora’s condition. I’m hoping she’ll be able to get the last fifty pages of her very moving book finished. I think it’s good, and real, and it’s clearly been harrowing to write. Her daughter, by the way, in answer to my question about what replaces ‘groovy’ has said, ‘out-a-site’ is the word. So now you and Paul can be with it, groovy, turned on and in by labelling everything ‘out-a-site’ . . .
Jo called on my last night at New York and Elnora and I were delighted. Jo said she had been trying to get to Yaddo for March but there’s no probable vacancy until May. She would make the place live a lot. I felt pretty depressed to think, suddenly, that as soon ahead as then, and before, I’ll be ‘out of this world’; it’s a grim thought.
Meanwhile, back in Yaddo, I’ve robbed the poetry shelves and set myself up very comfortably here and I’ll be able to enjoy the music on the pornograph and read through Art News that goes back to the early nineteen fifties, and other journals. I’ve put Ned’s photo near, and the little cream-man from South America also stands near—maybe I’m out-a-site but who cares—if you send me your photo I won’t display it of course but it would be nice to have . . . rush across and drop it in the Santa Barbara P.O. . . . I have washed, and walked in the sparsely-falling snowflakes. Don’t mind my writing letters to you! My thoughts are more often than not in Hermosillo Drive.
The kind of snow falling today is that where the snowflakes are so isolated they don’t know what to do except twirl round and round and melt before they land on the pavement, the wind blowing them in a distracted way. I love the grey in the sky.
Goodbye now.
Love J
The photos Basil sent are proofs only and I must write to the photographer for any I want. They’re not very good but there will be one or two fair ones. I look forward to your photos, I’m sure they’re a good bargain. I’ll look around for a cut-out body in exchange.
16. Yaddo January 8 —— 518-584-0746 (just in case)*
[footnote: *at 7. – 7.15 p.m. (the time of going to the other room for conversation)]
Dear Bill,
A morning letter. The photos are a delight—you’re an angel to send them. Need I say more?
(Breakfast: choice of cereal, raisins, wheat germ. Orange juice. Eggs anyhow. Coffee. Toast etc.)
The ‘raving old man’ I referred to in my last letter is Kenneth Burke the illustrious critic. He sleeps in the room above me, he’s an insomniac, and he has a preference for listening to allnight radio. He has a sly sense of humour, an unusually humble appraisal of his work, a voice that’s inclined to explode, and one eye that stays in its place while the other rolls around and around.
Already I’ve begun my ‘count-down’ of dinners—only so many left! They’re an ordeal. I just can’t bear dining in the presence of authorities—in this case the new director and his wife. Everything is so formal, everybody so bloody well-behaved, and after dinner we seem to be expected to go to the small room off the diningroom and sit and make conversation. So far I haven’t said a word—oh yes I said one or two last night and regretted them immediately. I almost spoke at dinner when the discussion was about repairing cars and washing machines and so on, the cost, the shoddy workmanship . . . and everyone had spoken—after all, the topic is not intellectually demanding and even MacDowell babies might be expected to speak a line . . . and I had in mind my experience of inserting a new ball-cock into my plumbing at home, and so, with heart beating fast at the contemplation of my daring, I framed, mentally, my opening sentence—‘I once spent all day putting in a new ball-cock’, but every time an opportunity came for me to contribute I panicked and said nothing and so the Yaddo meal-table never heard of my indelicate experience. Later, as we sat staring at each other in the anteroom, with everyone talking except me, I spoke a sentence. The topic was Marisol whom someone described as a disconcerting person because she would go to a party and sit and never speak all evening. I had been reading an article on the (socalled) ‘Tenth Street Painters’ and I murmured, too softly for anyone to hear, ‘There’s a description of her in that article on the Tenth Street Painters’.
‘What? What? What did you say? What? What? What?’
Oh my God! I didn’t have the courage to speak another sentence so I just mumbled and blushed and resolved never to speak again . . .
(Dinner: Pork chops, apple sauce, whipped creamed potatoes, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots. Indian pudding and Ice cream. Coffee and cream.)
Two composers are arriving soon. Douglas Addenbrooke (?) and ?? Rorum which means they will have to open the front library where the grand piano is as the only other piano is in the Pink Room where one composer will live and work. (There are grand pianos of course in the mansion and two other studios which are all closed for the winter.) The Pink Room is Katrina Trask’s former bedroom and overlooks the line of yew trees (I think they’re yew) that lead to her grave.
How does it feel, Bee,
now you’re immortalized,
so prized
by Emily?
A ‘burnished carriage’ put by.
‘Delirious’ incense.
A mad correspondence
with Fly?
A poetic fling,
Clover, Capitals,
Peeps at pistils,
two wings and a sting?
How does it feel, Bee,
to bed a lily?
We of Saratoga Springs and formerly of MacDowell are glad you’re Billy.
Bee! Your photos two
arrived. Was saying yesterday
to myself at Yaddo
that they were due—
I arrived here this week—
I’m settled and at work—
I’m an Awful Hack
– Not only your sweater’s warm and thick—
You’ll get this letter, say,
next week. Reply,
Bee, over rose-hip tea—
Yours, Jay.
I’m shameless.
(Dinner: chicken, cranberry sauce, rice with mushrooms, olives, asparagus, salad and hot rolls. Cream puffs. Coffee and cream.)
I was saving this for my photos but they haven’t arrived.
Goodbye for now & el mismo to you and all at 131 H. Drive.
More again soon!
17. Yaddo January 9
Bee, bear with me—you’d better—
for writing you another letter.
(How’s your ‘burnished carriage’, by the way?
Did you get to visit Fly?)
Alas my battery’s not in its prime
and I can’t keep up this rhyme
—perhaps another time.
I’m sending two scruffy photos—what a bad bargain you’re getting after your own magnificent photos. The one of me in the mirror’s the only one that turned out O.K., and that’s because I’m in shadow. The other is one I took early early in the morning on Grand Central Station after leaving Elnora’s and while I was waiting for the train and I’m still half asleep. At least the MacDowell photo gives you a reminder of Bill Brownia, with sweater and cake-tin and monkey. The flower drawing on the extreme right was made by the fifteen-year old son of the poetbb who wrote the ‘Tom Cat’ poem.
James K. Baxter
To try to make up the difference I’m sending you a few pages I don’t want from the proofs of my new novel which I’ve been correcting. Just a taste.
Now.
Now.
I’m preparing my dedication for this book Intensive Care, and I’m thinking of dedicating it to the person who made possible my visit to this country, and the person who will farewell me when I leave. I’m writing to the two people to ask if they mind and whether they want to be initials only or first names or full names.
If the people approve the dedication will read,
If you would be pleased rather than embarrassed or unpleasantly apprehensive do let me know how you would like to appear—as one or two initials or in name? Or what?
I want to get you into a dedication withour embarrassing you (or do I mean without embarrassing myself?) and I think this is the way to do it.
Or I could say something like (if you’d rather not be named) To Sue who made my visit possible, and the live oaks who sheltered me . . . and then you would have to explain now and again to the few people who might read my book that you are actually a live oak!
Any objections, ideas, etc?
(Dinner last evening, pot roast, horseradish sauce, green peas; salad and hot rolls (the salad and hot rolls appear every evening; sometimes it is cornbread); apricot whip which is apricots folded into whipped cream and other riches.)
Ned Rorem the composer arrives today. He has been quoted as saying that Yaddo is a luxurious concentration camp where he could neither camp nor concentrate.
I like also his quote about Beethoven and his wife (though I’m sure Beethoven didn’t have a wife).
Beeth: Don’t leave me darling, you’re my inspiration.
Wife: Me your inspiration? That’s a laugh!
With great self-discipline I was going to wait a few days before posting this but I have to know about the dedication.
Therefore
goodbye
& all kinds of thoughts (fantastic) for you & a helping for
N
& P
from J
18. Yaddo January
Dear B,
Bliss to get your letter which I’ll answer slowly, in instalments so as not to explode your mailbox with my feeling-rays . . . it’s snowing big flakes where this morning it snowed pinhead snow, I ate my lunch here seven hours ago (it is now four o’clock) and like a horse I’m nibbling lumps of sugar.
So the scene is set.
Meals are out-a-site—huge steaks, turkey (wild), salads of olives and dates embedded with cream cheese and coconut, ginger souffle with whipped cream, coffee-iced cake with strawberries and ice cream . . . squash and green peppers in a swirl of tomato . . .
No I did not know that the F. Bacon painting was called Dread Walking. To myself I had called it The Scapedog (I have it pinned on the wall here) as it seemed to be receiving more dread and terror than it could cope with; but if it is Dread then it must exude Dread upon its surroundings. I’ve thought now that the dread is the dread of being Dread [in margin: ‘not the thing but the effect of it?’], and that is why it is in such anguish. I find it very powerful.
Thank you for the Rilke Poems. I don’t think his French poems are here but they may be in the local library, and they’re certainly in the local college (Skidmore) library which Yaddo guests sometimes use. I do want to read them. I’ve had a whole world of feeling overturned or unburied by reading in the story of Rilke in Paris—how R. was influenced by Valery’s ‘Le Cimetière Marin’, which he read and translated less than a year before he wrote the elegies and sonnets; he and the Muse, I mean. ‘Le Cimetière’ seems to have overwhelmed him.
It is strange to look back to myself as a schoolgirl and remember the pale green book, Ils Ont Chantés, which I loved and read over and over, especially the poem by Valéry, ‘Le Cimetière Marin’. You may observe, even from Yellow Flowers, that I am hooked on cemeteries by the sea. Maybe I’m a necrophiliac: I collect cemeteries as I collect (through necessity) public ‘comfort stations’ which, I suppose, are only another variation of comfort. Rilke liked the poem because to him it was a ‘perfect poem’; I liked it because I liked it and it moved me—but the French are marvellous with sea cemeteries—dead sailors, fishermen. Ici repose.
TUESDAY.
Snowing it was and is not now. The tree-branches seem to have arranged themselves in all kinds of elaborate poses just to show off the shapes of snow lying along them; in one there’s a huge mound of snow like a snow-lion.
I’m not happy here. I haven’t laughed—real laughter—for ages and ages. [in margin: since Santa Barbara] Everything is so formal and serious and everyone is so determined not to spill a clue of irrationality or disorder, and one is reminded all the time that one is a Writer, an Artist—When you are writing do you . . . is this a problem you come across when you’re writing . . . you as a writer would have something to say on this . . . (you’re telling me!)
The Director and his wife (harmless and pleasant in themselves) have before-dinner cocktails with us and dine with us and have after-dinner conversation with us, and everyone chats happily except me. Oh my, it’s grim. [in margin: Hello to Paul] Working conditions in this big studio, however, are excellent. (Last evening beneath the formal after-dinner conversation Walter Aebacher (sp?) a—the?—sculptor told me he read of a Queen of England who built a scaffold so she could copulate with a horse.) I keep imagining what the portrait of Santa Barbara will be like. It is such a rich idea—how much richer to have a city named after a Saint than after a General, yet I suppose the portrait of a city named after a general would yield much that was unexpected and mysterious and terrible; and Saints, too, have their surprises. The Muse is in this somewhere, emerging from Hérodiade and Muzot and the live oaks and the oil derricks and the gaunt hills and the bird of paradise flower. How lucky you are to have a Muse to guard you and prevent you from destroying your own vision! I’ve never cared for the Muse myself—I think of her as a bitch—I think my muse is either an angel—a stray one—a choice of angels or perhaps Pluto, God of the Underworld who carried off Persephone and I’m Persephone transferred from flower-gathering to higher or lower things, mostly lower.
I hope you got the Pocket Mirror I sent. I have a spare ADAPTABLE MAN (title only) and if you like I’ll give you my spare Adaptable Man—it’s a very bad novel but it has a dentist in it—I think I told you about this—based on a dentist I saw only once in my life and inspired by one sentence he spoke to me, ‘Rinse whilst I’m gone’. It also has a minister who is obsessed with St. Cuthbert (as I have been since I met him in Anglo Saxon prose). And not much else.
I tried to get Snowman Snowman and The Reservoir (they’re together handsomely ‘boxed’) when I was at the Braziller office but George B couldn’t find one. I did not know that Alan Lelchuk was very fond of Snowman Snowman. It’s the only book of mine (apart from Faces and Y Flowers, I think) that he’s read. He did say, though, that he’d like a copy of these stories. He’s a ‘fucking arrogant’ young man (Philip Roth’s description of him, quoted by Alan) but I like him. He’s really all trembling sensitivity (or sexitivity, pretty much the same).
I hope Ned has yielded his little cupful by now and is able to go out and about in the garden again.
I called Elnora to say hello. She’s been asleep mostly but I think she will get her book finished when she goes to MacDowell.
I love the little sketches in your letter. More.
‘Un cigne avance sur l’eau . . .’
Our exclusive heart-ray model, transplanted at no extra cost (admittedly, the initial cost is high!) Can be converted instantly for killing (distance no object). A thousand uses, much in little, even your best friends are deceived by it, wear it on your sleeve, in bed, at parties. Do not, however, bend spindle fold or mutilate, use only as directed. Do not burn when empty. Shake before using. Keep in a warm place. Pierce before use. Tear only where indicated. Do not inhale.
[in margin: It is dangerous to exceed the stated dose.]
J
19. Yaddo January
Page One
Dear B,
Dear literate graphic numerate semi-live oaks, Thank you for the inspired drawing of my muse and the inspired collage. Paul, how did you know that I, my other self, (e.g. my muse) was thus exactly conglomerately constituted? I had an impression you were wise but not as wise—as clairvoyant—as that! Though my face is not a cat’s. It is rather more like the face in the collage . . . Hi, it’s me again. The photo is nice and thanks for sending it, though I do look as if I’m holding a false hand and your gestures, Bill, indicate headache or a longing for acromegaly.
Anyway, it was a lovely bonus in the mail, and it cheered me up and made it easier for me to bear, at dinner, (the mail arrived before dinner) the superior snappy tone Granville Hicks adopted when I ventured—ventured to say something. The tone implied, What a moron you are! I really don’t know why I stick it out here—meaning why I put up with it; habit I suppose, and comfort; but I just hate this constant presence of the Directors—oh for the infant days of MacDowell. Maybe I’m in Hell and MacDowell was the First Circle (lulled to happiness) and Yaddo is the Second Circle, and so on. I suppose it’s partly my own constitutional dislike of the presence of institutional authority which makes it difficult.
(My new book will be called Headache or a Longing for Acromegaly.)
Page Two
When I get some Elmerscc I will make a poem collage to send you, also a secrets of Yaddo Collage including Instant Measurements of Members (of the Executive). The housekeeper is a True Character. Yaddo is her life. Like Miss Gee in Auden’s poem she wears ‘a purple mac for wet days’ or its equivalent. She has a new deep blue coat especially for wearing to and from West House for her daily work. She is a fierce bedmaker and (to quote a witty guest), ‘You have to get into her bed as if you were a letter getting into an envelope’. She tucks and folds and smoothes.
Brand name of an American glue
The equivalent here of MacDowell’s Rural Violence is a tall dark woodsy-looking fellow called Milton. The staff here are all interesting characters. From time to time Miss Woods, the housekeeper, who, if you make the mistake of calling her Mrs is apt to say with a pitch of excitement in her voice, ‘Excuse me, madame, I’m Miss Woods, I’m a virgin’, will confide in me as a kindred spirit (she comes from Liverpool England and regards me as English too), and says darkly, ‘They’re going to weed out all those who don’t work’. With emphasis on the ‘weed out’. ‘Oh yes, madame, there’s going to be a lot of weeding out before next summer. They won’t be allowed to lounge around the swimming pool all day instead of working as they’re supposed to do. They’ll be weeded out.’
The ‘They’ of course are the artists. Temporarily when Miss Woods talks to me, I become ‘We’.
She is fearful of the guests whom she calls ‘The Men’. Although it is ‘the men’ she likes to do things for while the women guests get short shrift, as they say. In the morning she approaches me, looking cautiously about her in case someone might overhear, ‘Miss Frame, madame, have the men gone (to breakfast?). You know madame I don’t like to go to their bathrooms when they’re there. They might be embarrassed. What if they came in and found me!’
Yaddo could be such a fine place if only it did not have this tradition and the determination to keep the tradition of formality. Even one’s thinking is organized by the many notices. One can’t go to the lavatory without being reminded,
This is a small bore plumbing system
and then one is assailed by all kinds of frightful doubts as to whether one is a bore, whether one is a small bore to use the plumbing system, or maybe that somewhere on the estate there are places for large bores to pee. Or one could be a small bore but have a large bore peeing system . . . the possibilities are endlessly confusing.
How warm and soft green the pines are now, with all their snow suddenly washed away in the overnight thaw that brought great blocks of ice as big as automobiles crashing down from the roof. The pines have a spring softness. And the treetrunks are brown instead of that utter black which snowlight gives them.
So goodbye now.
How was Jerry’s show?
And
Love. Fragile. This Way Up.
Open at Above Room Temperature.
Do not Inhale Dispose of Wrappers Carefully.
20. Yaddo January (handwritten)
Dear Bill,
Another letter on my now endless supply of novel writing paper, with 1,000,000,000 thanks for yours & your permission, Bob Battersby, Benedict Beehaven, Ben Beezknee, Brendan Budgeknot. My dedication will read, ‘To Sue Marquand & Bill Brown for the possible & impossible greeting & parting’. Does it sound too crazy? I was going to say, With thanks for the coming and going, but that might have been misinterpreted, or, should I say, interpreted correctly!
How is Santa Barbara behaving at her sittings? I have decided that my muse is half-Pluto & half some God of Light—not that he’s any help to me, he just is & is there to be pondered on. I found May S’s book Mrs S hears the Mermaids Singing & I found it very moving and wise & brave—all emotional words that say nothing much. I like the way her mind works, I like to follow her explorations & insights. Jim Baxter (who wrote the Tom Cat poem) once asked me, Who does a woman use for a Muse? & we had an interesting discussion (I think at that time my mind was on Orpheus—maybe it’s still there). In JB’s poems his wife (a dear friend of mine) becomes the bad witch, the hag, the shrew etc. while his Muse is a mixture of Mary (he is a Roman Catholic convert) and Venus & various Maori goddesses (his wife is Maori).
How did I come to this topic?
Oh. Your portrait of Santa Barbara while your Muse hovers/lurks near to protect you. I wrote some verses about Santa Barbara and I’ll quote a little if you promise not to think it’s too bad which it is!
Desert is near encroaching,
habitual. Painters paint
riders, naked, setting out to challenge
the sun
aware or unaware
of the blade of light already
deep in the back between
the blades of bone.
Painters paint men with
their faces buried in darkness
diving unobserved, alone, into
baptismal darkness
for food they trust is benevolent
just as they believe in
the benevolence of their skin,
the membrane blessed
to meet the onslaught of
water, air, fire
when reasoned evidence
believes not.
Pause for station identification.
Later
Contrast: The blue sky. Alarming fires leap.
Butterflies drift from the broken
windows of cathedrals,
their lung-wings divining
the light. A cat
knowing, unknowing, following
a dream in its mazed
world collides occasionally
with human concern. Shapes
of cloth and skin descend
to ignite the purr-spark,
setting the engine going, but
it’s fairly glad to escape
from the medicinal downpour
the human shovel-stroke
the heavy word-chains of possession, to spring
out, out through the hole in the world
up like a black and white fountain into the tree
to lie in the fork of the tree,
eyes narrowed with sun,
fur ruffled, looking down
like a big black and white bean-blossom.
Undisciplined writing
Yaddo continues to feed luxuriously. With the arrival tomorrow of Dan Curley (where?) a writer who will have the painter’s studio adjacent to mine, we shall be full up no vacancies! Dinner at one table (eleven people, counting the secretary & the director & his wife) is too formal still, but there is quiet wit occasionally with Ned R. making dry observations about face-lifting, the Beatles and Helena Rubenstein. Ann Kazin is also witty. I say nothing but I laugh in the appropriate places my hollow laugh. I who have a dislike of all authority find the presence of authority crippling to the serene blossoming of my organic ego (an organic apple such as I tasted at Santa Barbara).
Last evening, however, I achieved some recognition—nay, call it fame—because I have a sprained wrist which the doctor (in Saratoga) has said (dramatically) I must immobilize & my fingers won’t type until it is better; and thus I joined the ranks, I became an insider, for Ned R has arthritis in his back, Ann K has a sore toe & others have various ailments . . . all acceptable as long as there is no suggestion of ‘germs’.
disused dentists’ drills
or
dentists’ disused drills
‘My Sad Captains’
By Thom Gunn
[quotation of first stanza]
capillaries of disused dentists
I liked the proboscis monkey very much. Everyone in the world—including the proboscis monkey—must miss you, and that, to me, seems natural.
Fortunately before I hurt my tendons (!?) I had typed 75 poems, all bad, really, for a book: about 10 written since I came here. This is a preliminary as it always is for my short novel (Mortal Enemy style) which remains out of reach like a tame chickadee that’s decided it won’t settle on my hand after all although it can’t resist sunflower seeds.
It goes over in my mind though (settles I mean) & becomes grimmer & grimmer & more like a hawk—nightingale—mocking-bird.
I miss the music. Goodnight (it is really morning but goodnight sounds closer) & thoughts for everyone in your household & for you.
21. Yaddo January (handwritten)
Hello again, without restraint while it snows powdery snow & the trees appear to have been visited in the night by Old Age.
I’m enjoying my big light studio very much and now that the missing link, Dan Curley, writer, has arrived I shall work here in the evening away from crowded West House which becomes (yes, Bee) a hive of activity with balls (ping-pong) knocking to & fro & pawns being surrendered or captured ‘en passant’ etc. The sitting-room-library reminds me, then, of Games Night in the looney bin—as the term was.
Last evening when everyone had left the diningroom & the small adjoining ‘conversation’ room I stayed alone to hear Sonata 32 op 111 Beethoven played by Schnabel, on the repaired pornograph.
Ned Rorem who leaves on Tuesday is giving us drinks in his Pink Room on Monday evening. I suspect that he finds Yaddo too formal. I find it even more formal than when Elizabeth Ames was Director, as the new Director & his wife are there among us, from the moment we leave our studios, & though, as I said, they are pleasant people their presence creates its own formality. They have a tendency to want to ‘inspect’ work & here the painters & sculptors, maybe composers, would be most inconvenienced. The young black painter (he’s 22) was disconcerted when the directors asked would he make an appointment for them to visit his studio to see his painting. ‘They mean well . . .’
Tomorrow it has been arranged that we play ‘Charades’ in the evening.
Good God.
Good God.
Good God.
To be fair to the directors, they did say, ‘It must never be said that anyone at Yaddo was forced to play Charades’. The pressure is there, though.
The ‘raving old man’, Kenneth Burke, talks often to me & I like to hear him because I have always respected his scholarship. He translated Death in Venice which is being re-issued. He translated it as a labour of love because he was so overcome by the story. His mind at 75 is agile, full of unusual & exciting analogies; he roves in a rich landscape of ideas.
I can’t help thinking of poor old Harrison K[inney] who seemed to be so limited & struggling with only Thurber as his life-line.
(I had a note from Jean Boudin—remember her frightful niece & the forced ‘poetry’ session?—Arnold Dobrin’s wife has left him. End of gossip transmitted by Steve (the subway fiend) to Jean B)
I am just about to receive 3500 dollars in advance & royalties (this is after 2300 have been deducted in U.S. tax and agent’s commission—gross 5800!)—more than I’ve ever had.
There’s an important Arts Conference in New Zealand in April. It’s part of a National Development Conference to plan the way the country should go & I feel very guilty because having received a special invitation (I’m not going) I’ve been given a chance to help to decide government policy in the Arts & I’m doing nothing about it. I have a remit form & on it I may suggest a place for N.Z. like Yaddo or MacDowell, unrestricted by nationality, where painters, composers, writers etc. can meet & write limericks together, play anagrams, drink rose hip tea and go to bed if they feel like it, AC & DC & all other currents switched on.
I hope you & Paul are at peace with your work & Ned with his stones. Ned really does look more like a blossom than a cat; probably he harbours rubies black & white and Dr Gilbride (a Thomas Mann surname, surely) is an international jool thief, cultivating stones as oyster-farmers cultivate pearls.
It’s strange not to be using my typewriter. I had forgotten that words arrive so quietly; their soundlessness has impressed me over the past 3 days; and yet I miss their shape; their shape in writing is too close to myself.
How is Santa Barbara? How is everything, the sky & the live oaks & the hills & the people, the people & the animals? And the piano with its shiny bones? A worn shine as if it had been kissed by pilgrims.
Goodbye; I mean Au Revoir.
And love AC, DC, 12v (harmless as a torch battery).
Cheese cake last night. Tonight strawberries and ice-cream.
22. Yaddo January
Hello, the trees are iced with Royal Icing, the snow is several inches deep and squeaks like new shoes and chickadees when you walk on it, and the air is filled with a white mist, and it is Monday morning and I have just written a poem called ‘The Dead’, of which the last two lines read, ‘I smile to see them now,/how contentedly they are clothed with sun’.
After I had written my verse I collected your letter with its lovely dissolved illustrations—I hope there was no mistake in reassembly or rejelling. I’m glad you heard from Jo. Her brilliance makes me bow my head and grow as an irritation in my mind or heart a minute pearl of envy. No, jealousy. Her mind has an anagrammatic pounce.
Meanwhile, at Yaddo, home of delicious desserts, we are quite a small family. Dan Curley writer. Ann Kazin, writer, who leaves tomorrow, and later in the week her husband Alfred Kazin arrives. Malcolm Bailey, painter, who is looking forward to the arrival of a young poet, female, described as a Viking with red hair; Kenneth Burke; and J.F. Also to arrive soon are Normon Podorovitz (?) the edirot of Commentary and Douglas Alanbrooke the composer.
Now read on:
J.F. no longer attends the cocktail sitting (complete with Director and wife—how much more acceptable she would feel them to be if they were not critics), nor does she stay for the after-dinner conversatione to spend the time discussing ‘who’s in, who’s out in the artistic world’. Her absence is described by Kenneth Burke as playing hookey.
Dear Kenneth who gave me the impression of being a ‘raving old man’ proved true to form the other night after he had a little too much to drink and after he had written a poem about his lately dead wife. He went insane for several hours and our fear was that he would not emerge from it. The Director and his wife panicked and went home leaving Kenneth in charge of Dan who managed him very well; it was very sad; we all love Kenneth; he is miles above everyone else in intellectual gifts and dreaming power. Dan wrote a poem about the episode and gave us a copy: it’s very moving.
Meanwhile I’m trying to work out how I can leave earlier than planned and go to Elnora’s apartment in New York where I hope Jo and Elnora will be able to visit me. I can’t think of any funerals to attend; the only other emergency is the act of claiming from the Inland Revenue the 3000 dollars or more they owe me; I could ask someone in New York to send me a cable Come at once, and leave it lying open in the snow when I’ve had breakfast.
My Mortal Enemy remains absent. I fancied there had been some kind of connection but I must have been on the literary pill, and that has had the side effect of clotting my ideas into oldfashioned verse so I daresay I’ll just go on writing verse while I’m here. I hope you don’t suffer too much discomfort over Santa Barbara—you may even be painting her now as you paint Paul’s student. I keep adding to my verse about it/her.
Feet walk here from time to time.
Not often. The foot
is apt to be caught deep
in the carpeted swamp of the supermarket.
In an easy way nobody cares
that a smoky breath above the Deep Freeze
is all that remains
of the sunken walker.
I love your decorated letters—could you not illustrate a book of Hours, of limericks, with fanciful L’s and O’s and so on? And how elaborate your bee is—I count at least four surcingles!
I lived among great houses
in the grey wastes of dread;
laughter not time destroyed my voice;
Droop droop no more, nor hang the head.
I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick
if as a flower doth spread and die.
O blissful light, of which the bemes clere.
Lord, the snowful sky.
Hath sorrow ever a fitter place
O Heart small urn,
Drop drop slow tears
Tears pouring from the face of stone.
I lived among grey houses
in the grey wastes of dread;
laughter not time destroyed my voice;
droop droop no more nor hang the head.
How do you like my collage poem filched from first lines of the great? Rather too many tears.
I love the photograph of the drawing; it’s immediate and complete. I think that in drawing one must have an awful lot of courage just to make a line and reject the temptation to hide it or blur it. In that way, maybe, drawings resemble poems where you can’t hide between the words, where everything shows.
The trees outside look like those Christmas trees for sale in the Santa Barbara supermarket.
Battery has run out.
As I told you we’re trying desperately to save our Peedauntal business from ruin. For a time we ceased manufacturing. Then one of the shareholders suggested branching into Rays but this has not been the success the management hoped for. Next, the idea of Peedauntal Scholarships was put forward; this may help; so far, unfortunately, there have been few applications (we had hoped to have an article at least in Time or Life featuring interviews with the Fellows. We are now working day and night in the utmost secrecy on the Eternal Peedauntal which we hope to distribute to Morticians as well as to the breathing and peeing public. Also a contrapuntal peedauntal which opera singers may favour more than they have favoured the usual model. Other variations suggest themselves—the parental (3 sizes), the Continental, the Departmental, the Accidental, the Frontal, . . . battery expired
Please recharge by return and a dessert of love to you 1st and 2nd helpings also Paul & Ned.
J
P.S. once more—I love the drawing photograph. It is like a poem because you have to start with belief in yourself when you make a mark on blank paper.
23. Yaddo January 20
Dear Bill,
Hello, so nice to hear your voice on the phone. I wish it were time for me to ‘pass through’ Santa Barbara on my dread way to New Zealand. Hurry up please it’s time.
I’m testing a Yaddo typewriter which has been lent to me as my own is being repaired while I have my strained/sprained wrist, and the Yaddo authorities and I want to find out if my wrist is better, as they are paying the bills for it (the wrist), as it was their nasty Yaddo door which inflicted it. This typewriter goes like a dream, so smoothly, it’s (I declare) granulated, velvetized, enzyme-coated, defatted, defrosted, globulized, saturated, irradiated . . .
I’m glad you don’t mind, in fact approve of, having a dedication. I’ve enjoyed my own slight experience of this, or of being ‘mentioned’. Years ago when I was staying with Frank Sargeson there was a constant visitor, a young poet (Frank used to take young poets under his wing) who later wrote a book of verse in which there was a Letter to F.S. where one line read,
‘And walk in on you telling Janet lies.’
I felt immortal!
I’ve never had a poem written to me, though, as you have. Jim Baxter who dedicated a book of essays on poetry to me (Janet Clutha—and I had to keep explaining to people that it was me—though if it had been initials only I would have had heavenly competition!) once said that the only realities in New Zealand were Rugby football, masturbation, Wilderdd (a murderer confined to the frightful Auckland Security Gaol, who is yet able to escape now and again and is viciously hunted, and who has taken up painting and with the help of local artists had a one-man show); and the other reality—yours truly . . .!
George Wilder was not a murderer; he was a burglar.
So you see Brendan Budgeknot, Barry Bracegirdle, how my ego blossoms . . . And I, too, feel for Velma Weeper and others. Most of my book dedications, if I’ve had any, have been to the kind psychiatrist in London, R.H.C. which some people have confused with Royal Holloway College!
You asked about Ned Rorem. He seemed to me to be in not very good health, but that’s just my impression. At Yaddo he’s been rather subdued, withdrawn, I should say rather depressed. He’s witty and he doesn’t waste words; also he’s kind. He leaves today. I told him I knew a cat named indirectly after him. I got the impression that (maybe like us all) he is being gnawed from the inside out like the Spartan boy.
Ann Kazin (Ann Bernstein) Alfred Kazin’s wife is nice. So is Dan Curley, a farmer-type from Illinois with a similar stance to Tom Frederickson—was that his name—the composer at MacDowell. As I said before, though, the formality of Yaddo makes it difficult for people to be themselves among one another—yet this is no great disadvantage for one’s work, and I think maybe it is an advantage; it means, though, that people get quickly ‘stir crazy’.
(Pause while I undo my lunch, slices of turkey, cheese, lettuce, chocolate-iced cake . . . )
The Director Granville Hicks
was up to his usual tricks.
He bought some hormone
from a Yaddo crone
and grew himself triple pricks.
A funny thing happened said Rorem
today on my way to the forum.
The thing was my own.
It stood up full grown
and laughed without sense or decorum.
Needless to say no-one dreams I have composed these limericks. I might be expelled.
More later.
Hurry Up please it’s time.
I’m glad you received The Pocket Mirror at last. I posted it on 3rd January! It must have touched down or been laid up for Refuelling at Fergus Falls Minnesota or some other place. It’s full of misprints. Also it lacks dignity and beauty—I long to write a dignified beautiful poem; my tone lapses into banality, I tend to leave the dark places where poems are best made and loiter around in the stereotypes and trivialities.
Quote from Anatomy of Melancholy:
‘Great travail is created for all men: Men’s thoughts and fear of their hearts and the imagination of things they wait for and the day of their death.’
End of darkness.
‘Bees are black with gilt Surcingles—
Buccaneers of Buzz.’ee
lines by Emily Dickinson
How nice of Emily to describe your surcingles—what are they?
Wild Honey.
More later.
When would it be convenient for me to touch down at Santa Barbara (Los Angeles?). And shall I stay 12, 22, 32, 42, n2 . . . days? or a2, b2, c2, n2days where (a2 - b2) = (a—b)(a+b) where sin2A plus cos2A equals 1 and sin is not opposite over hypotenuse . . .
stars for seeing.
I’ve just had my mail letters from Jo, Sylvie and May Sarton: all very nice indeed. Jo received your glittering rock, as she’ll no doubt tell you or has told you. Both she and Elnora (who’s back at MacDowell) would like me to stay—Jo in South Hadley for a week after Yaddo ‘springs’ me; and Elnora in the N.Y. apartment—oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh. Jo wishes you would come East for us to have a reunion before I go away . . . And I’m very eager to go to Santa Barbara, as Blue Jay seeks reunion with Bee in his own Clover attended by Butterfly, Rose, Bird of Paradise, Paul, Pacific, Ned (the Red) and all the live oaks one two three of Hermosillo Drive plus the mountain lions with their gaping golden bones. Maybe I’ll make a break-out from Yaddo earlier than I thought.
Dear Brendan Budgeknot, Barry Bracegirdle, enough of this crazy letter which you are under no obligation to answer, I mean not each one of these daily thoughts which fill your mailbox and accompany (with piano) your peanut butter delicacies.
Love for yourself Paul and Ned
J
24. Yaddo January
Dear Bill,
Hello from Bill-less Yaddo that (except for the composer, delayed by a funeral until tomorrow) now has its full complement of winter guests all settling down to write and paint in the mornings and afternoons and to have their scrumptious meal in the evenings at the ten-place table presided over by Granville Hicks (Pricks for Kicks!) and Dorothy Hicks, to whom, as I said on the telephone when I talked to you (I happening to be passing by the telephone at the time), I must now render charity. Their post is a temporary one, for a year until the new permanent director is appointed, and they have the difficult task of trying to change a few of the Yaddo traditions, against opposition from the army of housemaids and perhaps tradition itself. They too are appalled by the warning notices everywhere—Danger. Do Not. Beware.—and are even trying to change the tradition of having all the doors locked. Their custom of arriving at five thirty for cocktails at which we are more or less expected to appear arises from their natural delight in having a drink before dinner (don’t we all? Ah, sweet charity) and as Granville has to drive here (they have an apartment in Saratoga) and prefers not to be a drunken driver—well they must drink here. The after-dinner conversation which I now no longer attend is still in force. I’m glad though that I have struck (I think) a blow for individuality. Now when the Hicks say the formal phrase, ‘Shall we take our coffee into the other room?’ Dorothy adds, knowing there is at least one who will not be taking her coffee into the other room—‘at least those of you who would like to’. My absence is accepted now, and others, I’m sure, feel more free about leaving.
Cheers for Pioneer Janet, the innovator of the planet. Groans. Groans.
To continue with sweet charity, where was I—oh the prospective new directors had dinner with us on Sunday evening and (thank god they are not retired critics, though I think he ran a small press for the C.I.A. . . . in the days when everyone was doing things for the C.I.A . . ..) he seems a good type, quiet, practical, a good grasp of facts and needs—something in the style of George Kendall. I don’t know if he will be the permanent director. His wife rather resembles someone out of the film The Manchurian Candidate.
What a snob-place this is. Last week my story ‘Winter Garden’ appeared in the New Yorker and ever since then G Hicks has been very sweet to me; his wife too . . .
Yesterday Norman Podhoritz, editor of Commentary arrived. Also Freya Manfred, a young poet (as company for the young only painter), an unsophisticated Midwestern version of Alan’s Frankie; very pleasant. It’s so fascinating to see all the artists’ shyness (artists are terribly shy people aren’t they?) rise to the surface when new people arrive. You could even detect it in Kenneth B. He became a diffident elderly man who glanced apprehensively from time to time (as we all did) at the newcomers. I like Alfred Kazin, as I also liked his wife Ann.
Jo and Elnora called the other evening—one on each of the MacDowell phones and with much giggling we arranged that I would come up to Peterborough-South Hadley (Mark driving me from Springfield) on 15th from New York, stay overnight and return the next day to New York with Jo who has some business there; and I’d see Elnora too on my visit. I’m leaving here on the 11th to stay in Elnora’s apartment, and I’ve told Elnora I won’t receive mail there (she would have had to make complicated mail arrangements as all mail is forwarded to her at Mac-Dowell), so I’ll be letterless (though not phoneless) in New York. I’ll be there until 20th Feb when I go down to Baltimore (staying with J Money) for a medical check with a doctor in town there; and wait around some days for results and so on, I suppose. If I can afford it I’ll go back to New York . . . but it would be best to fly from Baltimore early in March—but I will let you know exactly—it depends on my female physical complications, as the Victorian ladies would say. How coy and charitable I have become during my stay at Yaddo!
I phoned Jo and Elnora last evening (also as I happened to be passing by the telephone) and they seem indestructible. I caught Jo (and perhaps Elnora) in the act of playing pool with the suave gentleman who first answered the phone, so it looks as if they are anagramless in MacDowell. Jo says she has finished her play or will finish it before she leaves; that is marvellous. She said Alan Lelchuk called at MacDowell a few days ago bringing Philip Roth with him and they spent a while in Jo’s studio.
I’ve sent away a selection of 70 poems to my publisher; they’re not much good, and need to be worked at; some were written here, many at MacDowell. Kenneth Burke asked to see some poems of mine and I showed him three (the first time in my life I’ve ever shown poems to a critic) and he read them so carefully and wrote a detailed two-page note which in itself reads like a poem e.g. (quote) ‘the last two lines are as quintessential as a Delphic Oracle’ (he was probably drunk . . . ). I had included one about The Dead as a kind of message to him because that is his problem just now and I was heartened to see that he wrote, ‘And the closing two lines are good emotional bookkeeping. As long as we have to live, that’s the best we can ask for, as regards the past’. It was presumptuous of me, I suppose, because he’s such a rich man intellectually that I’m sure grief for him is not so much a loss as a gain, a kind of bookkeeping, to use his own term, where he makes an emotional and intellectual profit. And when he read my story in the New Yorker he brought me a poem he had written about his dead wife.
I love the idea of trying to translate the French poem! You must be telepathic.
I made a very free sort of translation of the swan poem; not very competently.
A swan glides upon the water
as on a shimmering mirror
accompanied by its image.
Thus in certain moments a loved
being mirrored like the swan moves
upon the restless waters of
our soul, becoming as it glides
our joy casting its inseparable
shadow of dark dread. [in margin: Rewrite—teacher.]
Very corny, with the ‘as it glides’ pretty irrelevant, and the references to soul not made complex enough.
stars for comfort.
I have sent separately a spare Adaptable Man and a spare Scented Gardens.
Crazy love— J
25. Yaddo January 31
Dear Bill,
Hello on Schubert’s birthday. Hello with an enclosure of infantile pornographia which, because I am infantile and enjoy being infantile, I had fun doing.
Thaw is here, I’m weary, and I’m leaving here now on February 11th, early morning, having had courage to say that business matters called, which they do, but it is wonderful to know I have seven fewer dinners to sit at and pre-dinner cocktails to be more or less obliged to attend. It really is awfully stuffy having literary people around all the time discussing this and that book—at dinner Malcolm, the young black painter who is dying of boredom began, ‘There was a young man from Venus’, and someone said, ‘Now now Malcolm that’s not nice’ and the subject was quickly changed to How Writers Can Make a Living, with Granville Hicks lecturing me fiercely, so fiercely I blushed and looked scared, on being willing to send stories to the New Yorker when they ask for them. I stammered and stuttered, but if I had burst out with, ‘A frightened young tailor from Boston’ . . .!
I hope I’m going to Elnora’s apartment to stay about ten days and I hope I’ll see both Jo and Elnora in New York. I’m making a visit to Baltimore for a medical check-up and then returning to Elnora’s apt. I’ll let you know when I’m flying West—it will probably be from Baltimore as it’s easier to use the airport and take off in time—it will be early March, I daresay. Dare I? I dreamed last night that I came to Santa Barbara and the sky was filled with butterflies and as I watched them the colour fell from their wings, they turned grey and white, and they began to devour me . . . interpret at your peril . . .
Excuse my stupidity today.
Love from moron J
a Illustration based on a parlour game that involved several participants drawing on a folded sheet of paper.
b James K. Baxter
c Brand name of an American glue
d George Wilder was not a murderer; he was a burglar.
e lines by Emily Dickinson
